Heat Lightning

16

VIRGIL FOUND a bed at the RootyToot Resort on Candi Lake, a place with tumbledown brown-painted fake log cabins and beds that were too short, and mattresses that were too thin, and pillows that were flat and hard and smelled like hair and Vaseline; but that also rented fourteen-foot aluminum boats with 9.9-horse Honda kickers, that came with the cabin and he could take out anytime.

Virgil had stayed there twice before and didn’t mind having a beer or two with the resort’s alcoholic owner, Dave Root, though at five o’clock in the morning, Root was unconscious and Virgil took a key out of a mailbox, left a note on Root’s door, and checked himself in.

He lay in bed and thought about God and the people who were dead on this case, and who’d died years ago in Vietnam, if Ray Bunton had been telling the truth, and wondered what all that was about, and how somebody like the dumb-ass preachers on TV could think this could all be part of God’s Plan.

God didn’t have a plan, Virgil believed.

God had His limits, and one of them was, He didn’t always know what would happen; or if He did know, He didn’t care; or if He cared, He was constrained by His own logic and couldn’t do anything about death and destruction. Virgil believed that God was actually a part of a rolling wave front, hurtling into an unknown future; and that humans, animals and, possibly, trees and chinch bugs had souls that would rejoin God at death.

Which brought him to Camus’ big question, and he didn’t like to think about Camus, so he went to sleep.

He woke up at eight, bone-tired, rushed through a shower, got his musky rod out of the car and his emergency tackle box and walked down to the boat, pushed it off; heard a man yelling at him, looked back and saw Root, standing on the grass shore, barefoot, in black Jockey shorts and a white T-shirt.

Root shouted, “Hey, big ballplayer,” and he heaved a perfect, twenty-yard spiral pass and Virgil plucked a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft out of the air, ice cold. “Back in an hour,” Virgil called, and he headed across the lake, into the wind, to the far shoreline, where he set up a drift and began casting along the edge of a weed bank.

The water was clear and the sun was on his back and he could see into the water as though it were an aquarium, and it all smelled wonderful, like pine and algae and fish, and nothing at all like a blood-soaked car. In forty-five minutes, in three drifts, he caught two hammer-handle northerns, threw them back, and had a follow from a decent, but not great, musky. He was happy to see the fish in the water and he worked a figure eight, trying to get it to strike, and finally gave up, sat down, and cracked the Miller.

The beer was pretty much dog piss, he thought as he drank it, but not bad on a morning that was cold on the verge of turning hot. He finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the bottom of the boat. He felt like a horse’s ass for doing it, but took out his cell phone and checked for messages.

Two: Davenport and Carl Knox.

He stared at the Knox call for a moment, then clicked through to the number, and sat there on the bench seat looking at a woman and a small girl fly-fishing on the far shore, the woman showing the girl how to roll a cast out over the water, and Knox answered after two rings.

“Virgil Flowers, BCA, returning your call,” Virgil said.

“Flowers-where are you?”

“ Bemidji,” Virgil said.

“Then you know about Ray,” Knox said.

“Yeah-how did you know about it?”

“Have you looked at a TV this morning?” Knox asked.

“All right. We need to talk,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. But I’ve got myself ditched where this asshole can’t find me, and I’ve got my own security,” Knox said. “I’m pretty far from Bemidji, but I can get there. We need to meet someplace… obscure.”

Virgil scratched his head, looking in toward the RootyToot. “Okay. Where are you coming from?”

Hesitation. Then: “Down south of you a couple of hours.”

Liar, Virgil thought. “Okay. There’s a broken-ass resort northwest of Bemidji on Highway 89 about four miles north of Highway 2. It’s called the RootyToot.”

“Wait, wait, let me look at my atlas… page seventy-one… okay, I see it, south of Pony Lake.”

“That’s it,” Virgil said. “There’s a Budweiser sign right on the highway. See you when? Noon?”

“Noon. Be there right on the nose. I ain’t hanging out.”

TWO HOURS and a little more; he could spend more time on the water, and he did, until the sun started cooking his nose. He had some suntan lotion in his tackle box, but he didn’t want to get started with that; he needed to go in and shave. He called Sandy and said, “I want you to do something for me. You heard that Ray Bunton got killed?”

“Yes. It’s everywhere. All the TV people are flying up there, wherever you are,” she said.

“Okay. What I need is, I need you to do research on Ray Bunton, and see if you can spot his mother’s house without knowing her name. If there’s a way to track Bunton through the res, somehow, and get to that house.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “I’ll start right now.”

HE CALLED Davenport before he started the motor, and Davenport came up and said, “What happened?”

“You probably know as much as I do-or, if you don’t, call Chuck Whiting. What you don’t know is, Carl Knox called me and we just negotiated a meet-up north of Bemidji. He says he’s coming up from the south, but he’s lying-he’s coming down from International Falls.”

“You gonna bust him?”

“I’ve got nothing to bust him with. He says he’s hiding out from the shooter. But he wants to meet because he’s got something. We’re set up to meet at a place called the RootyToot Resort, whatever the heck that is. I gotta get my atlas out and find it, I’m heading up there to scout it out.”

“Careful, Virgil. This might be a place that he’s got locked down,” Davenport said.

“You don’t think he’d pull anything? With a cop?” Across the lake, the woman with the fly rod had hooked into a panfish of some kind, probably a bluegill, and handed the rod to the little girl, who played it in. And far down the lake, he could see the white line that meant a bigger powerboat was headed his way.

“No. I’ve talked to him a couple times,” Davenport said. “He’s an asshole, but, you know… he’ll talk to you. He knows where things are at.”

“All right. Listen, I gotta run. I’ll call you as soon as I hear something,” Virgil said.

“Stay in touch. I’ll talk to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune, let him understand that things are breaking, that we should have something pretty quick. Maybe he could drop in a story that would take some pressure off.”

In another thirty seconds, Davenport would hear the powerboat in the background. Virgil said, “Okay, I’m running. Talk to you.”

Virgil stuck the phone back in his pocket and smiled: what Davenport didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Or Virgil. He cranked the motor and headed into shore, the water smooth as an old black mirror.

WHEN HE WAS cleaned up, wearing a fresh but ancient white Pogues T-shirt, and a black cotton sport coat over his jeans, he went off to the bar to talk with Root, who’d had a couple eye-openers, getting up a morning shine so that he could drift painlessly through the afternoon before getting totally crushed in the evening.

“Virgil fuckin’ Flowers, ” Root said. There were three other men in the bar, two facing each other across a table, the other sitting at the bar, all three with beers. Root introduced Virgil: “This is my friend Virgil Flowers, the famous outdoor writer, who is also a cop and is up here investigating that murder in Bemidji, I bet. Is that right?”

Virgil nodded, and said, “Good morning, David. I see the lake is empty of fish, as usual. Give me a Diet Coke.”

“Empty of fish,” Root said. “If you knew a fuckin’ thing about fishing… whoops…” He grimaced at his own language, and Virgil turned and saw the fisherwoman and the little girl walking past the screen windows, and a moment later they came inside.

The woman was probably forty, Virgil thought, thin, small-breasted, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and nice brown eyes. She had a fisherwoman’s tanned face and arms, with a small white scar on one of her arms, and Virgil felt himself slipping over the edge into love.

She glanced at Virgil and smiled and then said to Root, “We need a cream soda and an ice cream cone,” and Root got a soda from a cooler behind the bar and the little girl fished an ice cream cone out of a freezer by the door, the woman paid, and they took the soda and the cone to a corner table.

Root said to Virgil, “So what happened to this Indian dude?” and the three drinking men bent his way.

Virgil shrugged and said, “Well-I know about what you do. The killer’s the same guy who killed those guys down in the Cities, and the guy in New Ulm. We know that. Now it’s just… working through it.”

“What are the chances of getting him?” one of the men asked.

“Oh, we’ll get him,” Virgil said. “The guy’s asking for it, and he’s gonna get it. The question is, will he kill anybody else before we get him.”

“That is a question,” Root said. “The answer is, I think I’ll have a beer.”

SO THEY SAT and talked about murder, fishing, hunting, and boats; and after a bit, the woman finished her cream soda and she and the girl left, the woman raising a hand to Root, saying, “See ya, Dave,” and he said, “See ya, El,” and when she was gone, Virgil asked, “Who was that?”

“Her name is Loren; everybody calls her El, like the letter L. She and her husband got a place down the lake,” Root said. “He works in the Cities four days a week, comes up here three. Four days, though, she’s sorta… untended-to.”

“Untended-to, my ass,” one of the men said. “You tend to her, her old man’ll blow you up, that’s a fact.”

“You know him?” Virgil asked.

“Asshole,” the man said. “Big shot at Pillsbury.”

“How does that make him an asshole?” Dave asked, the beer bottle poised at his lower lip.

“I dunno. He’s an asshole because he’s married to her and I’m not,” the guy said. “I’m sitting in a dogshit tavern at eleven-fourteen in the morning drinking beer.”

“But that’s a good thing,” Dave said.

THEY SAT UNTIL almost noon, adding women to the list of murder, fishing, hunting, and boats, and then Virgil excused himself and wandered off. His cabin was in easy sight of the driveway. He thought about it for a minute, then went to his truck, fished around under the seat, got his pistol and a leather inside-the-waistband holster, and tucked the gun into the small of his back.

Then he sat on the top step of the cabin’s stoop, where he could be seen from the driveway. The woman and the girl were down at the dock, messing around in a boat, and Virgil watched for a couple of minutes, then a Jeep rolled into the parking lot and parked. The two men who got out weren’t fishermen, Virgil thought, and he stood up, and as they looked around, he nodded and they walked over.

“Virgil?” The two looked like bookends: tall, dark-haired men with bent noses and an air of competency, both wearing black sport coats and khaki slacks and L.L. Bean hiking shoes and black sunglasses.

“That’s me. But neither one of you is Carl,” Virgil said, remembering the portrait photo at the dealership.

“No, Carl’s coming in, he’ll be here in a minute or two,” the man said. He looked down at the lake, and the half-dozen boats tied to the pier, and the woman and kid. “Sal, why don’t you go get a few beers.”

Sal nodded wordlessly and walked down to the bar.

Virgil said, “You’re security.”

“Yeah, sorta.”

“Where’d you get your nose bent?” Virgil asked.

The man grinned, and Virgil suspected all of his short glittering-white teeth had been capped by a very good dentist. “ Chicago, actually.” He looked down at the pier. “You know the chick?”

“I asked about her, they know her in the bar,” Virgil said. “And the owner didn’t know I was coming until this morning-I sorta dropped in.”

“All right. Woman with a kid, they make a good recon team, you know?” the guy said. “You got a woman with a kid on the street, who’d think they might be wired-up?”

Virgil said, “I’ll write that in my notebook.”

The man said, “You do that.” Then he tapped Virgil’s chest. “The Pogues. Goddamn good band. I’m Irish myself.”

“You didn’t say what your name was,” Virgil said.

“Pat. O’Hoolihan. Pat O’Hoolihan.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

The man showed his teeth again. “Yeah. I am.”

Sal came back with two cold six-packs: “Four drunks talking about bait. I thought my ears was gonna fall off, and I was only there for two minutes.”

“Gotta learn to relax,” Virgil said. “Get in the flow of the conversation.”

Sal popped his gum. “I’d rather be dead.”

The man who wasn’t named Pat O’Hoolihan got on his cell phone, dialed a number, and said, “We good.”

KNOX ARRIVED in a black GMC sport-utility vehicle with an unnecessary chrome brush guard on the front, and two little tiny chromed brush guards on the back taillights, and Virgil said to Sal, “These taillight brush guards look kinda gay.”

Sal popped his gum. “I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right.”

Knox climbed out of the passenger seat, and another bent-nosed guy from the driver’s seat. Knox was a large man, balding, with a fleshy face and a heavy gut, who looked like he might deal in bulldozers. He was wearing khaki cargo pants, a white shirt, a black sport coat, and more L.L. Bean hiking shoes.

He walked down to Virgil’s place and said, “Mr. Flowers.” Not a question.

Virgil shook hands with him and said, “Why don’t we go inside?”

Knox looked at the cabin and shook his head. “Nah. I hate enclosed spaces that I don’t know about. Let’s go find a stump.” To the security guys, he said, “Why don’t you guys hang out?” and to the one who wasn’t named Pat, he said, “Larry, come on with us.”

Virgil said, “Yeah, come on, Larry.”

Larry said, “That’d be Mr. Larry to you, Virgil. Let me get one of those six-packs.”

THE THREE OF THEM strolled down to a picnic table behind one of the cabins, out of sight of the bar, out of sight of the driveway. The mom and daughter were kneeling on the dock, peering into the water, and Larry said, “Nice ass,” and Knox said, “C’mon, man, she’s only eight,” and Virgil had to laugh despite himself. They all took a beer and settled on the picnic table bench. Larry faced away from them, looking up at the cabins; the other two men were wandering around the driveway.

“So what’s the deal?” Knox said. “I understand you’ve been talking to my daughter.”

“The deal is, somebody is killing people-and all the people who are dead went to Vietnam in ’75 and stole a bunch of bulldozers. The last guy to get killed…”

“Ray.”

“Yeah. Ray. Ray told me a story. He said that while you guys were stealing the bulldozers…”

“Weren’t stealing them,” Knox said. “It was more of a repo.”

“Whatever. When you’d finished taking the bulldozers, there was a nasty shooting incident. Murders, is what it was. Ray said that Chuck Utecht was talking about a public confession about the killings, and somebody needed to shut him up. But by then, Utecht had talked to Sanderson, and Sanderson had talked to Ray, and it was all getting out of control. The killings are professional. So we asked ourselves, ‘Who is still alive, who might be able to find some bent-nosed killers from someplace like Chicago to come in here and clean up his mess?’ I guess-well, hell, we thought of you.”

They were sitting facing the lake, their legs away from the table, their elbows back on it. When Virgil stopped talking, Knox said, “You hear that, Larry? You’re a bent-nosed killer from Chicago.”

“I resent the hell out of that characterization,” Larry said. He burped beer. “I have many fine qualities.”

The repartee, Virgil thought, was a cover: Knox was thinking about it. Then he said, “This was a really long time ago, and I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“That’s what Ray said-he didn’t have anything to do with it. He said he was driving a lowboy back and forth, and when he got back the last time, some house was burning down and somebody had gotten shot.”

More silence. Then: “It wasn’t one. It was four. At least. And that wasn’t all…” He shook his head.

“You want to tell me?” Virgil asked, pushing.

“Yeah. I can’t prove it, but I might even be able to point you at the shooters,” Knox said. “But they’ll have deep cover. Deep cover. And if you go after this guy, you better get him… and I got a few more things I want.”

“Like what?”

“I might have some evidence,” he said. “You need to say you took it off Ray. Somehow found it in Ray’s shit. Not from me.”

Virgil said, “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Then, hey-maybe I can’t find it… It’s not because I’m trying to avoid responsibility,” Knox said. “It’s because I don’t think you’ll get this guy. Even with the pictures. And if you don’t get him, there’s a good chance he’ll take me out. Or my kid, or my ex-wife, because he’s fuckin’ crazy. I know you and Davenport think I’m some kind of big crook, but honest to God, I never had anybody killed in my life. I wouldn’t even know who to ask. I sell bulldozers.”

Virgil felt the ice going out: Knox knew. He went back to the essential point: “You got pictures…”

“Yeah. Not with me, but I can get them.”

“So tell me the story…”

IN 1975, with Vietnam coming apart, old man Utecht found the bulldozers. He called his kid, who called Wigge, and Wigge called Knox. Knox was another ex-GI, who’d been stationed in Germany, and had been trained as a heavy-equipment operator. “I fit with their plan-we all knew heavy equipment, one way or another, and we were all ex-military, except Utecht, and Ray was the truck driver.”

He flew to Vietnam with Chuck Utecht, and they were picked up at the airport by Chester Utecht, who drove them out to the equipment yard.

“Some of the stuff was new, but was already in trouble because it’d been sitting there for a couple years, and the jungle was eating it up. The fuel lines were all clogged up and the fuel filters had turned into rocks, and some of the rubber hydraulic lines were eaten by squirrels, or something-these little red-bellied fuckers, they’d eat anything. Anyway, there was more stuff than you could believe…”

The crew went to work, restoring one machine at a time, getting them moving, and then Ray arrived and began hauling the bulldozers away. “We had a big truckload of spare parts, I don’t know where Chester got them from, but they were all new. We were sweatin’ like dogs out in the sun, there was no shade in the yard, it was about a million degrees out there, bugs as big as my thumbs. We had these whole pallets of Lone Star beer… we didn’t have access to safe drinking water, so we were drinking like three or four gallons of beer a day just to stay hydrated.

“Anyway, there was this big house just down the way… across this dirt road, and it had a water pump outside, one of those old pump-handle things, and Chester said if we drank it, we’d get dysentery, but it was all right to rinse off with it, to cool down, and we’d go down there and pump water into a bucket and throw it on each other. It was cool… but there was this old man there, he’d come out and scream at us… Screaming in French, didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.”

Knox drifted away for a couple of minutes, then said to Virgil, “You know something, Flowers? This one time, I was delivering a used Cat over in Wisconsin, the west side of Milwaukee. They were building a subdivision, they were going to beat the band. And I was there, and they had these guys working in a trench, putting down a water line, and the trench fell on them. Sand and clay. Six or seven guys, but four guys went under, and we all jumped in there and started tearing up the dirt with our hands… and all four guys died. When we got them out, they were like sitting there, with their mouths full of dirt and their eyes open, but all covered with sand, deader’n shit. I don’t think about that but once a year. And hell, it was an accident, you know…

“This thing in Vietnam, I don’t go two hours without thinking about it. For more than thirty years-”

Virgil said, “Somebody’s across the lake with a high-powered rifle, and you’re gonna say, ‘The asshole’s name is-’ and pop! The killer nails you. So could you give me his name? Just in case?”

Knox made a huh-huh sound, which was his kind of big-guy chuckle. “ Warren.”

“Ralph Warren?”

“Yeah. I assumed you knew that,” Knox said. “His name, anyway.”

“I never got to anybody before they were dead, except Ray, and he didn’t know who Warren was.”

Knox laughed again, a short half grunt, half laugh. “Well… who else do you know who could import a bunch of bent-nosed, cold-eyed killers?”

“But one of the cold-eyed killers got killed,” Virgil said.

“Yeah? That guy up at that rest stop?”

“Yeah. Ex-military, special forces,” Virgil said.

“Probably Wigge’s man. Probably an accident. Warren wouldn’t have wanted Wigge to see it coming, because Wigge was a hard-ass himself. They’ve been tangled up forever-ever since Vietnam, anyway.”

“So-what happened in Vietnam? Warren did the killing?”

Knox nodded. They’d gotten as much equipment as they could onto the ship-even though that meant that some perfectly good stuff would be left behind-and called it a day. But when the last truck left, Knox said, and they knew the truck itself would be lifted onboard the ship, Warren and Wigge produced a couple of bottles of rum that they’d bought the day before from some Cambodian security guards, and they started mixing up rum and Cokes.

“ Cuba libres, they called them back then. Goddamn, they were good when it was hot outside,” Knox said. “So we’re sitting around drinking and we’d already had two or three gallons of beer, and we’re gettin’ pretty fucked up, and Warren says he’s gonna take a bath. We’re all laughing at him and giving him shit, and he pulls off his shirt and walks down to this house. Probably a hundred meters away. Pretty nice house, older, palm trees around it. Looked French, and this old guy used to yell at us in French, so maybe it was.

“Anyway, there was this chick down there, we’d seen her a couple of times, coming and going on a bicycle, but… mmm… Warren goes down there carrying this gun-Chester gave us a couple of M16s, just in case-and he starts taking off all his clothes until he’s buck naked, and he’s drunk, and he gets under this water at the pump… and this chick comes along on the bike and she doesn’t see him until she’s already off it, and she tries to run around him, and he comes after her, and grabs her ass, and he’s drunk and sort of rubbing himself on her and laughing…

“So the old guy comes out, and this time he’s got a rifle, and he points it up in the air and fires off a round and we’re all, like, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and the girl runs into the house past him and he comes running down from the porch screaming at Warren, and Warren is like picking up his clothes, but the old man keeps coming and he gets too close and Warren throws his clothes at him and grabs his gun and boom. Then he runs in the house after the chick, and there’s more shooting, like bam, bam, bam-bam-bam, and we’re all running down there, but not too fast, because of the shooting, and we only got the one other gun.

“We get there, and there’s this dead guy in the yard. And we all freaked out. We all stopped, and I remember Chuck saying, ‘I’m getting the fuck out of here,’ and then there was some screaming from the house, and we can hear Warren yelling, and we’re all like going, ‘What the fuck?’

“Then there’s nothing. We’re yelling, ‘Ralph, Ralph,’ and he yells, ‘I’m okay,’ and we go in there, look in there, and there’s these dead kids in the hallway, these two dead little kids, and we can hear this… this…”

He stared away, across the lake, and Larry said, “Jesus Christ,” and Knox went on: “I went through that and I went into the next room, and here was Warren, and he was fuckin’ this chick. He was fuckin’ her, and I could see she was dead, or she was dying, but he was crazy drunk and he was just fuckin’ her…”

“Pictures,” Virgil said.

Knox nodded. “I had this Instamatic. Like this little Kodak pocket camera. I was wearing fatigue pants, and, shit, I had this bad feeling that I could get blamed, that we could all get blamed, and Warren was banging her like mad and Sanderson was yelling at him and he wouldn’t stop, and Sanderson ran away and I took a shot of Warren banging this chick, and then I took off, but I took a shot of the kids, and the old man, and then I went running out of there. I was thinking if they tried to blame all of us we could use the pictures as evidence against Warren, who did the whole thing.”

“But nothing ever happened?” Virgil asked.

“Nah. We didn’t really understand it all at the time, but that whole country was going crazy. People were stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, people were trying to get out, they were stealing boats and robbing stores for money, it was crazy. Chester, when he found out about the killing, he freaked out. He said we had to get the fuck out of there and keep our mouths shut. That’s what we did. We all got jammed in that van and we took off for the airport, and we camped out there for four days before I could get out, but some of the guys-Warren, I think, and maybe Sanderson-went with the boat.”

“Ray said he saw Sanderson back at home just a couple months later, so he didn’t go with the boat.”

“Well, shit, they just took them to Indonesia,” Knox said. “That’s only, like, three or four days away.”

“I don’t know anything about that part of the world,” Virgil said.

They all sat there, staring at the lake, then Virgil said, “I’ll see what I can do about the photos. About attributing them to Ray. But… I don’t know. I’m gonna have to have them, and if we have to argue about it in court, Warren ’s gonna know where they’re coming from anyway.”

Knox bit his lip and then said, “What if I tell the guys from Chicago to put a bullet in your head and walk away?”

“I’m heavily armed,” Virgil said.

“That won’t work, then,” Knox said. He dipped into his jacket pocket and handed Virgil an envelope. “What I did was, I scanned the negatives and then I printed them out. I really don’t have the negs with me-if you can get him with these, I’ll bring the negs around as the final nail in the coffin. But I’m not giving them up. They might be the only thing between me and Ralph. As long as he doesn’t know where the negs are…”

“When Wigge was killed, his fingers were cut off. He was tortured,” Virgil said. “If Warren was his good buddy, why’d he do that?”

Knox said, “Because he’s nuts.”

“But that’s worse than nuts-it’s unnecessary. The pro they brought in, he might be willing to kill some people, but he’s not gonna risk his neck so somebody can get his rocks off slicing a guy up.”

Knox rocked back and forth on the bench for a moment, then said, “After Sanderson got killed, I sent Warren copies of the pictures. Didn’t say who had them, I just said, ‘Back off or the police get the pictures.’”

“Ah, man. He’s been looking for the pictures,” Virgil said.

“That’s what I think.” Knox turned his head to Virgil. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Pogues-Boy, I don’t think you’re gonna get him. He’s too well-connected. It was all too long ago. I don’t even know who could prosecute it as a crime. The Vietnamese? You think he’d get a fair trial? I don’t think anybody would send him back there… I mean, I just think… I think he got away with it.”

“Then why all the killing?”

“Well-they couldn’t hang him for it, but if these pictures got out, that’d be the end of him, businesswise. Look at those little kids he gunned down. Look at him fuckin’ the dead woman. Nobody would touch him. He’d be like Hitler.”

Virgil made Knox walk through it again, then said, “You think you’re okay where you’re at? For the duration?”

“Couldn’t find me in a million years,” Knox said.

WHEN THEY were gone, Virgil called Davenport.

“I got a killer,” he said. “Might not be able to get him, because it was all so far away and long ago, but I’ve got pictures of the crime in progress.”

“Anybody I know?” Davenport asked.

“Yeah.”

Long moment of silence, and then Davenport said, “Virgil, goddamnit…”

“Ralph Warren,” Virgil said.

Longer moment. Then: “I gotta see the pictures. How fast can you get back?”

“I’m heading out now,” Virgil said. “I’ll be back by dinnertime.”

“Then come to dinner at my place. Six o’clock,” Davenport said.

“See you then.”

VIRGIL GOT his gear out of the cabin, threw it in the truck, and went to get a beer to drink as he headed south. The fisherwoman was putting the little girl in a new Mercedes station wagon, and she nodded at Virgil and asked, “Was that some kind of meet?”

“What?”

“Well, they told me in the bar that you’re a state investigator, and a writer, but you were up here on that awful murder, and all of you guys were wearing black sport coats like you’re covering up guns, and I could tell that those other guys were hoodlums of some kind.” The woman had a small handhold on his heart, and it was getting stronger. The way she could roll that fly line out there…

“A meet. That’s what it was, I guess,” Virgil said. “I’d be happy if you kept it under your hat.”

“Mmm. I’ll do that. Virgil Flowers? Is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She had little flecks of gold in her eyes.

“Are you armed right now?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.

“Huh. Well, my name is Loren Conrad.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

She walked around the car and stopped before opening the door. And the little girl, maybe ten, was looking at Virgil out through the glass of the passenger-side window, solemn, as if something sad were about to happen. “Maybe if you come up again, during the week, we could go fishing.”